The present invention relates to an information service providing system for providing information service, more particularly to a technology that is applied effectively to an information service providing system for providing other entities with know-how accumulated in an entity.
As a conventional system for selling digital contents, sales of various contents have been proposed. For example, JP-A-11-345261 specification (laid-open on Dec. 14, 1999) describes a contents management system and a storage medium for realizing sales management and utilization management for each content by transmitting a permission to utilize and a result of the utilization to a center apparatus and managing them when contents are output by a terminal.
On the other hand, a number of technical development have been conducted in research and development organizations such as various kinds of enterprises, universities or the like, and knowledge and learning obtained through these technical developments are made known to the public in the form of press releases, academic announcements or the like. However, some of the knowledge and the learning are kept secret by a research and development organization in order to maintain competitiveness against other research and development organizations or are put to practical use only within an research and development organization due to reasons such as the one that a technology is still under development. Since a research and development organization has an aspect that it can keep predominance by keeping secret such know-how accumulated within it, the know-how is not generally sold to outside the organization as various kinds of information services.
There is a problem that providing other organizations with such know-how accumulated in the research and development organization is difficult with the above-mentioned conventional system for selling digital contents because, if the know-how is provided utilizing the system, the secret is hard to be kept.
Further, since specifications and methods of utilization of some technologies accumulated within a company as know-how are considerably changed, it is possible that the maintenance of the technologies is difficult once they are provided other entities with.
In addition, since a characteristic of the recently spreading Internet is the free use by individuals, even if know-how such as the above-mentioned one is provided over the Internet, researchers, technicians or the like utilize the know-how out of their personal demands. On the other hand, since these individuals utilize know-how providing services as a part of their jobs, corporations they belong to bear utilization fees and a specific idea is required for user management of the services for providing know-how.
Moreover, if a business for providing other entities with know-how is conducted, it is preferable to collect a multiplicity of kinds of know-how accumulated in a company and other companies to form a list of abundant items rather than to provide a single piece of know-how existing in a company. In such a case, it is expected that manifold inquiries are sent to a inquiry counter of a company from users of the service and, since the inquiries consist of technical terms in various fields because what is provided is know-how, there is a possibility that it is hard for the inquiry counter to process the inquiries by understanding them and transfer them to departments in charge of answers.